

oellen Masters is a Master Lecturer in Humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies (CGS) where she teaches a two-semester sophomore introductory course in philosophy and ethics. She received her Ph.D. in English from Boston University in 1996; her dissertation was entitled Bound by Duty: Women and Work in the Victorian Novel. While completing her dissertation, Dr. Masters taught expository composition, nineteenth-century American and British literature, and courses in women’s studies at small colleges in the Boston area before landing at CGS in 1997.
Her early scholarly work appeared in journals such as Victorian Literature and Culture and JNT: Journal of Narrative Technique; her book reviews in Dickens Quarterly and Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, the latter an open-access, peer-reviewed publication; and an art review for Oscholars, a website devoted to studies in fin-de-siècle culture.
In 2010, Dr. Masters began her fruitful affiliation with The Latchkey: A Journal of New Woman Studies, starting as a lowly book review contributor before being promoted to Book Reviews Editor, then Co-Editor, and finally, General Editor for this open-access, peer-reviewed periodical dedicated to studies in New Woman fiction, the fin-de-siècle, and proto-feminism, and which ran from its first issue in 2009 until its last, Winter 2018/2019.
More recently, her research has focused on Sir Henry Simpson Lunn, a figure who occupies a rich space where studies on the British ecumenical movement and the late-century’s leisure culture intersect. In 2019 she received a Curran Fellowship from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals to support her work on Lunn’s Travel: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine, a periodical that illustrates the complicated union between fin-de-siècle journalism and commercial tourism. A connected branch of this dizzying and gratifying research comprises Dora M. Jones, herself prolific journalist, fiction writer, translator, travel writer and, for years, Lunn’s assistant and assistant editor of Travel.
Created 8 October 2025
Last modified 20 October 2025